Guidance for Instructors to Represent Their Own Teaching

The instructor statement is the centerpiece of the instructors’ documentation of their teaching. The statement should go beyond the philosophy of teaching. Use the instructor statement to explain what and how you teach, giving specific examples to illustrate why you use the approaches you do and (very importantly) how you know whether those approaches are effective (i.e., how consistently are students meeting major learning objectives, what sort of feedback are you getting from students and how does that inform your teaching?).

An instructor statement could take the form of a single integrated statement describing how and why you have designed, implemented and adjusted or improved the courses you teach, how you approach mentoring, and your contributions to teaching community and leadership. Alternatively, you could write short individual statements on each teaching dimension identified (or bullet points, if acceptable to your department). This approach may be easier for both instructors and reviewers, especially if a department chooses to focus on a subset of dimensions each year, cycling through all of them over time.

CTE’s adaptable Benchmarks Frameworkand Rubric can help you structure a reflective statement(s). The prompts below can help you think about how to write about different elements of your teaching (our Self-Reflection Guide in the Sidebar has a downloadable version; or the Annual Review Template provides a table format for reflection). If you are only representing your course-level teaching, focus on 1-5. 

1. Goals, Content, and Alignment. What are students expected to learn in your course(s) and why? What content and materials do you use and why?
2. Teaching Practices. What activities and assignments do you use in and out of class time to help students reach learning goals?
3. Class Climate. How do you encourage motivation, a sense of belonging and mutual respect among your students?
4. Achievement of Learning Outcomes. Does the student work on these assignments meet your (or other stakeholders’) expectations and course learning goals? How do you know?
5. Reflection and Iterative Growth. Have you changed your teaching over time, either within a semester or from one semester to another? If so, what prompted the changes (e.g., your reflections on students’ learning, student feedback, new strategies you learned in a workshop)?
6. Mentoring and advising. Describe your mentoring or advising of students for academic and career choices and for scholarship. How do you make yourself available and communicate with students? How do you support students’ professional development?
7. Involvement in Teaching Service, Scholarship, or Community. In what ways do you participate in or contribute to the broader teaching community, both on and off campus?

See an example of an instructor narrative in the Example Course Portfolio in the sidebar.

Materials from your courses can provide supporting evidence and examples to help a reviewer understand your approaches to your teaching. Consider including one or more of the following items from one or more of the courses you teach. For any supporting documentation you include, be sure to point reviewers to it in your reflective statement so that they know what they are looking for. You can also create a Course Portfolio for an individual course, which organizes your supplemental information into a coherent package framed by a brief narrative. For more details, see our Course Portfolio Guide and the Example Course Portfolio in the sidebar. Materials you might consider including:

1. Syllabus (or an annotated version of your syllabus).
2. Sample course materials, such as a sample assignment with rubrics or grading criteria, and a sample instructional activity that helps students acquire the skills/knowledge needed for the assignment.
3. Representations of student learning, such as summaries of student achievement on different rubric dimensions or annotated samples of student work, can provide valuable evidence (see the Student Work Consent Form in the sidebar for permission to use student work). For guidance on how to represent student learning for teaching evaluation, refer to the Representing Student Learning Guide in the sidebar.
4. Student feedback (if available) and your reflections on it can provide valuable insights. See the Including Student Feedback Guide in the sidebar for more details.

Here are some other tools aligned with the Benchmarks framework that can help you document and represent dimensions of your teaching that are not linked to specific courses:

• Mentoring and advising. Example surveys to gather information about Graduate Advising (.docx) and Undergraduate Advising (.docx), an example Graduate Advising Report Template (.docx). Individual instructors may use these example surveys to collect data on their own undergraduate and graduate advising but the surveys will be most beneficial if administered at the department level. 
• Involvement in Teaching Service, Scholarship, or Community. Department and institutional expectations for contributions to teaching service, scholarship, and community can vary widely across units, campuses, and instructional roles. Instructors may document these contributions through their CV or by completing a departmental form as part of the evaluation process. Below are categories of activities that could be included:
  • Teaching or assessment committees (note, some departments may place this contribution under Service) 
  • Participation or supervision of co-curricular activities and/or experiential learning (e.g., service learning)
  • Participation in teaching community or teaching development opportunities (KU or external) 
  • Leadership roles in teaching communities or development opportunities 
  • KU or external Presentations or publications on teaching (e.g., public portfolio, posters, essay, paper, videos, shared course materials)
  • KU or external grant applications related to teaching (indicate year, status, and amount)

To prepare for peer review, gather your course materials to provide to your peer reviewer for the review conversation. These materials could be the same types of materials you’d compile as supporting documentation for a self-reflection narrative (see above). Essential items include (1) Syllabus; (2) Examples of assignments and criteria for assessing student performance; and (3) Examples of student work on the assignments. You could also provide (in writing or through the conversation): a description of reasons for decisions about content and goals; elaboration of instructional design, reflection on students’ achievements and plans for future course offerings. See Guidance for Peer Review page for more details about structuring a high-quality course-focused peer review.

Once a term is over and grades are submitted, it’s easy to forget all the great insights and reflections you might have had that could inform the next iteration of your course. Taking a little time to document results and reflections as you go can make the process of representing your teaching much more manageable in the long run. It can also help you avoid the problem of “pedagogical amnesia” and help you continue to develop your course and improve students’ learning.  

Use Instructor Statement Prompts for End-of-Course Reflection

After a course, use instructor statement prompts above to note key reflections. Gather evidence of learning found in student work and reflect upon what it says about the course. Identify areas of weakness in the instructional design and plan actionable changes that might benefit future students.  Share your results with colleagues or through peer reviews to receive constructive feedback and enhance your course further.

Capture Key Insights Immediately After the Course

In the process of offering a typical course you’ll likely spend about 50 hours in contact with students (in class, labs, studios or consultations), and probably the same amount of time outside class in preparation, reading student work, and general course management. Rather than discard the products of that substantial amount of time, it’s very useful to set aside some time to write down your impressions of a course. Comment on which topics or issues you would emphasize more or de-emphasize in your next offering. Consider how well you felt the assignments, projects, and exams represented the skills and knowledge you hoped to see in your students. Were there particular areas of student work (e.g., assignments, particular exam questions, or dimensions of an assignment rubric) on which students consistently excelled, or seemed to struggle? Making notes about such changes is best accomplished right after the course is over, while the ideas and experiences are still fresh in your mind.

Build an Archive of Student Work to Track Progress

Save some representative samples of student work that show what you and they accomplished together. It’s disheartening to a teacher to think that after years of teaching there has been no progress in advancing students’ understanding of our field. If you have a small but accessible record of some key performances from several offerings of a course, you can review them for any trends. Maybe you see some consistent problems that you can address with more time, different materials, or additional practice. Maybe you see some improvement over time that was not apparent to you during teaching. Ultimately this is why we teach, to help students appreciate and understand our fields as we do. Keeping a small archive allows you to see how you are doing in a longer perspective, and to make examples visible to others. You can use this student consent form (.pdf) to get your students' permission to use their work in representations of your teaching.  

Treat Teaching as a Scholarly Endeavor

Whatever your field of research or creative activity, you keep archives of your work. You have examples of studio work, lab data, and notes from library visits or interviews; you capture the important products of your inquiry into your field in many ways. Given the amount of time you likely spend each semester on teaching (probably more than 200 hours total for two courses), it would be a shame to lose all the benefits of that work by not developing some record of what was accomplished. The syllabi, assignments, and student work are done anyway, so you should not simply throw them away. Reflecting on and writing out your observations to capture your insights now of greatest understanding is a wise investment. It will help you grow as a teacher and achieve your goals, and ultimately those reflections can document your intellectual work as a teacher.